A unique inside look at the electronic structure of a highly touted metal-organic framework (MOF) as it is adsorbing carbon dioxide gas should help in the design of new and improved MOFs for carbon capture and storage.

On Wednesday, Oct. 9, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists for pioneering methods in computational chemistry that have brought a deeper understanding of complex chemical structure and reactions in biochemical systems. These methods can precisely calculate how very complex molecules work and even predict the outcomes of very complex chemical reactions. One of the laureates — Martin Karplus of Harvard University — has been using supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab since 1998.

At a March 21 NASA telephone news conference, scientists from the U.S. team participating in the European Space Agency’s Planck mission to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) discussed Planck’s first cosmological results, including some surprising news. For one thing, the universe is 13.82 billion years old, a hundred million years older than previously thought,

The Planck collaboration has released its first cosmological results, based on trillions of measurements of the cosmic microwave background. The results owe much to Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), including tens of millions of hours of massively parallel processing, plus the expertise of physicists and computational scientists in the Computational Cosmology Center (C3) who generated a quarter of a million simulated maps of the Planck sky, essential to the analysis.

Phase 1 of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)’s newest supercomputer, named Edison, has made its way to Berkeley Lab. The architecture is a Cray XC30 (“Cascade”) and will be installed in two phases. When it’s fully installed in 2013, Edison will have a peak performance of more than 2 petaflops (a petaflop

A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-organized consortium that includes Berkeley Lab scientists has for the first time mapped the normal microbial make-up of humans. Berkeley Lab’s role in mapping the human microbiome revolves around big data, both analyzing it and making it available for scientists to use worldwide. The research will help scientists understand how our microbiome keeps us healthy. It’ll also shed light on our microbiome’s role in many diseases.

Even as the “supernova of a generation” came into view in backyards across the northern hemisphere last August, physicists and astronomers who had caught its earliest moments were developing a surprising and much clearer picture of what happens during a titanic Type Ia explosion. Now they have announced the closest, most detailed look ever at one of the universe’s brightest “standard candles,” the celestial mileposts that led to the discovery of dark energy.